The Obama team understands how technology works, they’ve proven it over and over again. (Releasing campaign photos under Creative Commons license and hosting them on Flickr is just the merest of indicators.) During his presidency, Obama and his government should continue this course of openness and become the most open, transparent and accessible government yet.
To guide that process, Larry Lessig (and a quite impressive crew) have created open-government.us where they set out three principles to make sure it’s going in the right direction:
- No Legal Barrier to Sharing (adopt non-restrictive licenses like Creative Commons)
- No Technological Barrier to Sharing (provide video files, code for re-use and remixing)
- Free Competition (no commercial entity should have unfair benefits)
Also, here’s a brief slideshow with audio commentary by Larry Lessig summarizing the project’s ideas:
